Microsoft to showcase Natal at Gamefest in February

Microsoft today announced that it will reveal more details about its upcoming motion sensing peripheral for the Xbox 360, codenamed Project Natal, to developers at its Gamefest conference this February. According to the event's website, one session will focus on designing games for the peripheral while another gets into the technical aspects of it, giving advice on gesture recognition, avatar retargeting, speech recognition and more.

The company has yet to announce an official release date but the fact that many developers are just getting this information three months from now is not very encouraging -- as it will probably be a long while before they have any worthy games ready for the public. That said, Microsoft has already got some major publishers in the loop and expects to have several quality titles ready for the device's launch sometime next year.

Previous rumors have hinted at a November release aimed at impulse buyers, with the hardware set to cost between $50 and $80. Microsoft denied these claims but of course we didn't expect anything else from them.